


Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

by Kainosite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, Political RPF - France 19th c.
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Extensive Discussion of Canonical Character Death, July Monarchy, M/M, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 02:04:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20368840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: They say poets have prophetic dreams.  But how to tell the true from the false?





	Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iberiandoctor (Jehane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jehane/gifts).

The funeral unsettled him more than he expected.

Afterward his friends vied for the honor of hosting him in Paris for the night, but Béranger managed to persuade them at last that he was feeling unwell and he would be sorry company, and that it would be better for all concerned if he were to return to his own lodgings and sleep in his own bed. It was true that he would make a poor dining companion, but it was his heart that ailed him, not his body, and in his grief human society had become unbearable to him. Making conversation was a slow torture. All he wanted was to be alone so that he could marshal his thoughts and try to regain some sort of equilibrium.

He hoped the walk back to Passy might clear his head, or failing that, drown his turbulent thoughts in the soothing oblivion of exhaustion. He walked back and forth to the city several times a week, but it had been a long day, and the two leagues from Père Lachaise were farther than his usual peregrinations.

It came as no great surprise that he’d found the day an ordeal. Béranger had always hated these grand public funerals. Not that a funeral could be described as a pleasant day out under any circumstances, but there was something particularly trying about these: the spectacle, the crowds with their ever-present threat of violence simmering an inch below the surface, the florid sentiments proclaimed over the coffin by dry-eyed men who had viewed the deceased with cordial loathing only days before, while those who truly mourned tried desperately to cling to their composure as they watched a loved one vanish beneath the earth forever with no chance to make a private farewell. 

When he wrote his will he was going to have to add a clause telling them to slip his coffin into the cemetery under the cover of darkness, dig a hole beside Manuel’s, chuck his body in, and run. No ceremony, no announcements in the newspapers, no risk of bloodshed. If the people of Paris wished to mourn his passing, let them do so in private, or raise a glass to him in the wineshops and sing a few songs in his memory. He could not bear the thought of anyone dying for his sake, of being accompanied into the next world by an escort of unlucky students or unfortunate workers like the honor guard of strangled slaves entombed with an ancient king.

Béranger needed no companions on that journey. There was already someone waiting for him on the other side.

Casimir Périer would have hated such an escort too, though for very different reasons. The thought of any disorder being carried out in his name would have appalled him. Not that there had been much danger of it from the sullen crowd of civil servants turned out on their bosses’ orders to watch the cortège go by. Strange, to think that if Périer had died but two years earlier he would have met with the obsequies of a Foy or a Manuel. Now he died the most powerful man in France and practically unmourned. Of all the great names gathered around the coffin, only the Prefect of Police had been struggling to hold back tears.

That public ingratitude pained Béranger almost as much as his own grief over Périer’s death, for it reminded him too closely of others France had not thought to honor until it was too late. He too was disappointed in the prime minister, he too had believed Casimir Périer to be something more than the portrait revealed in the unforgiving light of power. He had thought him more able, more adroit, more equal to the demands of his high office. He had hoped wielding such wide authority would make him braver, instead of calcifying his fear into a ruthless rigidity. Still, Périer was a true patriot, a true statesman, and Béranger could not help but esteem a man who devoted himself so wholly to the public good, even if he did not much care for Périer’s vision of it. The prime minister had worked himself into exhaustion trying to bring stability to a regime he had not wanted, in the wake of a revolution he had not asked for. He had died without achieving it.

They had not been friends, but Périer had been a faithful ally at times when others faltered. He had been cruel sometimes – to Laffitte, to Thiers; never to Béranger – but he had refused to indulge in the vanity and infighting that had divided and weakened the liberal opposition under the Restoration. He had fought against absolutism with a passion that was no less for the limits of his ambitions or his determination to keep their resistance within legal bounds. If he had no faith in the people – well, that was a fault he shared with all of them save Manuel. Laffitte and Thiers were every bit as guilty of it as he.

Périer had betrayed his hopes, but never his trust. Béranger could not say the same for himself. He could not forget what he had told Laffitte in the aftermath of the July Revolution.

“I believe, like you, that a republic is not yet possible,” he’d said, pulling his friend aside in the courtyard of his house, where the liberal deputies were convening to decide what they would make of the revolution. “We need a king and one is as good as another. If you want this one, very well! I consent to the union. It will be a marriage of convenience; its duration will depend on his conduct. Love him if you must, but do not let yourself be carried away by your enthusiasm, and above all do not let him make you a minister. Let Périer have it; he is more eager than you, and prudence demands that you hold yourself in reserve.”

It was good advice. Béranger had sensed even then that they had a heavy road ahead of them, though he had not guessed just how bad things would become. If Laffitte had listened to him, he would have saved himself from political ruin and perhaps from financial ruin as well. And Périer, without a doubt, would have worked himself into an even earlier grave. Perhaps Béranger hadn’t fully appreciated the fragile state of Périer’s health, but he’d known well enough that the new government was a poisoned chalice, and he’d coldly advised his friend to stand back and let Périer drain it to the dregs.

Béranger had worked for fifteen years to bring about the revolution. When Manuel died and he’d wanted nothing more than to hide himself away in some little corner and retreat into his memories, he’d grit his teeth and gone on, determined to complete the great task they had begun together. As that bloody July softened into August it seemed to him that he had done enough. Let others take responsibility for the chaos he had unleashed and try to reconcile the contradictions of their new republican monarchy. Béranger refused to lose any more of his friends.

They had not heeded his counsel, Laffitte and Dupont and Thiers and the rest. Only Mignet had eyed the new government with a reporter’s jaded eyes and had the sense to back away. Quite soon they stopped listening to him at all, and Béranger had ceased to advise them, for his nagging was useless and wearisome to everyone when it fell on deaf ears, and all the petty factional bickering drove him mad. He would have stayed at Manuel’s side whatever came, but Manuel would have valued his advice.

Today, for the first time, he was glad they had ignored him, despite the ruin and ignominy to which politics had reduced Laffitte, despite the frustration and misery it had brought to Dupont, despite the strange and contorted shapes into which it was twisting Thiers. Looking at Périer’s coffin and the tears filling the eyes of the Prefect of Police, he understood at last the wicked selfishness of what he had proposed. He had forgotten that Casimir Périer too might have friends, until he recognized in Gisquet’s white, desolate face the mirror of his own grief five years before.

Who was it, again, who had let fear build up an impenetrable shell around his heart? 

“A plank over a stream,” he’d called the new dynasty, a little makeshift bridge to span a gap too wide to jump, that chasm between absolute monarchy and a free republic. What a fool he’d been. It was not a stream, it was a pestilential marsh stretching out as far as the eye could see, wreathed with a reeking miasma, swarming with biting insects and dotted with black pools into which his old friends slipped and drowned. It was not a matter of crossing a single plank, but of picking their way down a long line of boards laid out one after another through the mire, with the end of the path lost from sight in the mists. In the monotonous sameness of reeds and stagnant water one began to wonder whether the path had an end, or whether the hateful fens went on forever.

They did not. Somewhere beyond lay solid ground, sunlight, birdsong. Forty years ago they had stood on that far shore; they knew that it existed. Béranger had not lost his faith that they would reach it. But he had been too stupid, too careless and self-absorbed, to ask what the journey might cost them. It was still preferable to the alternative, to fording that raging current in which so many lives would have been swept away, but it would not be, as he had once hoped, an easy passage. They would come out of the fens exhausted and bedraggled, befouled with black, stinking mud. And some of them, like Casimir Périer, would not come out at all.

**Author's Note:**

> The speech in which Béranger throws Périer under the omnibus is taken almost verbatim from Laffitte's memoirs, edited slightly for length and clarity.
> 
> The rest of his thoughts on funerals and the July Monarchy owe a great deal to his [autobiography](https://books.google.com/books?id=JZcBAAAAQAAJ) and [two](https://archive.org/details/correspondanced02br/page/86) [collections](https://archive.org/details/lettresindites00bera/page/n9) of his letters.


End file.
